Why did the electorate provide Barack Obama with such a decisive victory? Most of the political pundits had felt Mitt Romney would have been a more creditable candidate. They perceived Obama as a weak, first-term president, and historical precedent showed Obama could not win with unemployment at or near 8 percent.

The actual election outcome obliterated such inaccurate notions. What was wrong with those forecasts?

For openers, Willard Romney went way too far to the right during the contentious GOP primary season. Most Americans did not want to see a solution to undocumented immigration take the form of "self deportation" as Willard proposed.

Politically, the GOP badly miscalculated when it predicated a Romney winning strategy on running up unbeatable vote totals among white males and older Americans, while ignoring younger unmarried women and virtually all minorities.

The GOP also shot itself in the foot by its mean-spirited, race-tinged efforts to alienate white voters from the president by sordid but failed attempts to cast Obama in racially stereotypical ways. (He is lazy; he tried, but lacked the ability and so forth.)

This race-baiting helped inspire minorities to come to the polls and may have created sympathy for Obama among some white voters. In the same tone the GOP's efforts to suppress minority voting may have caused an increase in minority turnout and stroked the sympathy button among more tolerant whites.

Romney proved to be a blatantly unappealing flip-flopper. The GOP's search for a broadly acceptable identity got strangled by its own excesses that should not have been election issues.

What sensible voter would not have asked, "What kind of party is the GOP, who brazenly suppresses minority votes, has old white men defining for women what rape is and when women can dispose of an unwanted pregnancy?"

Where are we left now? Regrettably, America still faces a huge financial deficit, a so-called financial cliff that could, through legally mandated spending cuts and concomitant tax increases, plunge the country into a deep recession. We still face complex international situations with no easy solutions and a massive jobless problem.

True compromise is the only pathway out of the maze of potentially crippling problems we must solve now. In the first year of this second term, the president must forge a bipartisan agreement that fairly raises revenues and cuts spending but, still invests in new jobs, upgrades our deteriorated infrastructure and develops a more competitive education strategy. We can't accept having dozens of countries out perform us in math, science and reading!

It cannot all be on Obama, though. Responsible GOP leaders must abandon their ideological opposition to sensible revenue increases and unite with the president to get America back on top.

I do not mean to frighten die-hard states' righters, but before 2016, hopefully before 2014, Congress should reform federal elections to outlaw the crazy web of gerrymandered congressional districts drawn to make a seat Republican or Democrat and to issue free federal ID cards to serve in all elections. Too many people have died fighting for voting rights to allow even one more local political manipulation to suppress or otherwise alter a vote!

Presently, Europe is buried in a sinkhole and China is experiencing a slowdown. The world would welcome a reliable, economically strong America to step into the void and lead the world back form an economic precipice. To assume that task America must fix its internal problems.

While we are at it, let's finally bury this "small government" idea. This is a big world and we are a huge country. Small is not a size that fits many of the situations we face today.

Edward White is a member of the Indian River County Democratic Executive Committee. Email: Ewhite@indianriver democrats.net.